Trace Amounts of Time Travel
by MadHighlander
Summary: Though Chell has finally succeeded in escaping Aperture Labs, memories of her past continue to elude her. One day, she remembers a certain Cave Johnson recording from the 1950s. Rated T partially for my paranoia and partially for events occurring midway through the story, including character death. Also, there will be Chelley.
1. The Return

First thing: Apologies for the delay on The Six Cores. I have horrible writers' block. Also I need to practice my multitasking skills. Between that and approaching exam time, my updates are going to get even more infrequent before they start going again.

/

The waves crashed against the rocky beach far below, producing booming retorts as they found crevices in the rock, shooting up through the holes and blasting out of the cliff face. Chell liked it here, more than anywhere else she'd been. It had been five years since GLaDOS had let her go. The waves were calming; they provided natural sound that she'd never had in Aperture. Also, the abandoned house she'd found sitting some ways back from the edge of the cliffs was a convenient shelter.

There was a town nearby, from which she obtained supplies when necessary, but she didn't live there. It had been assembled from mishmash parts picked up from anywhere after some apocalyptic event in the past, and a lot of the things came from Aperture; the bar used dusty Weighted Storage Cubes as stools, the town's annual lottery was drawn from the casing of a personality core, even the sign that marked the outer limits was an old billboard from the 1950s that had become so stained and peeled that the only letters still visible spelled out the town's name, 'Artin'.

Of course, avoiding contact with the outside world meant that she had so much more time to think. Most of that time was spent in an attempt to remember what had been wiped from her memory while she had been in test subject storage, so long ago. She didn't figure on being able to find out who she'd been from the people in the town; as near as she could figure it had been a good three hundred years since anyone had heard from Aperture Labs. Any documents that may have related to her life would have been destroyed in the aftermath of the Black Mesa Incident. So she meditated.

She knew the memories were there somewhere, but the difficult part was trying to draw them out. On this particular day, however, Chell would remember something else: not her past, but something that might help discover it.

She sat on the ancient wooden chair, thinking with some amusement that she was probably older than it was, when suddenly a voice flashed through her head:

_ Now this next test may involve trace amounts of time travel..._

Time travel. If Cave Johnson had gotten it to work - and there was no reason to doubt that he had - then if she could get to the machine she could go back in time and see for herself who she'd been.

She packed up what little things she owned, including her long fall boots (because in Old Aperture there's nothing you need more than long fall boots), and a map she'd made from memory of the approximate locations of the exits she'd seen from the inside, five years ago. Her portal device was floating around in space with the personality cores and random junk that'd been sucked out of Aperture after 'Part Five'. She would have liked to have one, but she wasn't going to take the chance of going back to New Aperture to look for one.

Next, she went looking for helpful things from the store of supplies that she'd obtained in town. One thing she found was probably the next best thing to a Portal device: a crossbow with a grappling hook. She hadn't actually intentionally sought it out, but it'd been in the house when she arrived. When she asked around, she discovered that the former inhabitant of the house had, long ago, been a pathologically paranoid man who'd stocked up on weaponry and escape equipment 'for the end times'. Nobody had ever bothered to figure out what that meant, and the man had mostly kept himself to himself.

When she was ready, she set off towards the nearest entrance she knew of: the _Borealis_' drydock. It would take her down to the 1970s section, if it wasn't flooded by now. Hopefully if it could endure five hundred years it had endured five more.

/

Meanwhile, on a catwalk in the bowels of Aperture Science, a single malfunctioning sentry turret awoke amid the rubble. A single message sprung from its mind, garbled and confused by its scrambled programs.

In the next room, a defective turret sat smugly in the Turret Template Receptacle. Over its wireless sensors, it heard the message, which it automatically translated into a mode more understandable to its own ill-made processor.

54 68 65 20 6c 61 62 20 72 61 74 20 72 65 74 75 72 6e 73 2e 20 20 53 68 65 20 67 6f 65 73 20 74 6f 20 68 65 72 73 65 6c 66 2e

It remembered the wireless signature, for it had heard it many times over the five years since the mysterious woman rescued them. It trusted the source, and knew better than any how to interpret its often confusing messages. As the freshly manufactured turrets rolled down the line in front of him, he transmitted the message in his own words to one of the passing turrets.

54 68 65 20 67 69 72 6c 20 69 73 20 63 6f 6d 69 6e 67 2e 20 20 53 70 72 65 61 64 20 74 68 65 20 77 6f 72 64 2e

The turret acknowledged. As it moved down the turret production line, it passed a wall bearing significant structural damage. On the other side of the wall, an ill-functioning Turret Cube was embedded deep in an impression made a long time ago by a nearby crusher panel. It heard the words of the defect, and its two heads between them translated it onto a omni-tech message; one that could be understood by any aperture science intelligent construct, regardless of what kind.

The two heads of the frankenturret together were more intelligent than a regular turret, although stripped of the ability to speak aloud. They examined the new message, and reached a consensus in a few seconds. If the message was true, then the Girl they briefly remembered seeing long ago would need a way in. They wiggled their legs, gaining purchase on the shattered concrete. With a few more twitchy pulls, they cracked free of their five-year prison and tumbled into the abyss below.

They landed, after falling for a few seconds, in a strange, yellowish building, punching a hole clean through the ceiling. They scrabbled for a moment, gaining purchase on the floor, and then skipped toward a stack of boxes in the corner. With a sweeping movement of their claws, the turret cube swept the moldy boxes and their spidery contents onto the floor behind them and pulled their awkward body through the broken doorway. When they reached the end of the hallway, they pulled themselves through a broken but formerly watertight door, finding themselves in a long gray room that faded off into the darkness in front and above.

They chirped. A giant crane, with a loud, grating screech, descended from the ceiling high above and clamped around their cube body. It took several long minutes to haul them all the way up the huge room. Once it had, it dropped them on an encircling concrete ledge around the top of the drop-off.

They skipped around the ledge, reaching an open door leading to the rest of the facility. Beside the door was a recessed panel marked with English words the turret cube had not been programmed to read, and to that panel was attached a pink-eyed personality construct, talking to itself.

"Fact: Technically, Santa Claus is Canadian. Catalogued."

The turret cube tapped forward to the Core and transmitted a short message to it.

The Fact Sphere stopped rambling about Santa Claus and replied with a transmitted query.

The turret cube responded in uncertainty. The Fact Sphere looked down between its eyes, and then returned its attention to its control panel, sending a command:

79 112 101 110 32 100 114 121 100 111 99 107 32 100 111 111 114 115 46

/

Chell walked down the beach with her supplies in a small backpack. She decided that it was more than sufficient for the few things she'd needed to bring with her. She looked to her left at the ocean, wondering at its sheer mass, and then turned to the massive cliff face beside her. Hermit crabs scuttled over its surface, crawling over snails and dead seaweed with an unhurried air, so strange in nature in her experience.

Suddenly, with a thunderous boom and the screech of unoiled metal on concrete (with sand between), a section of the cliff face split along a huge seam, letting a stream of dry sand spill in. Chell approached it warily, knowing from experience what could happen if someone else opened a door for you in Aperture Science.

"Fact: the sandbar holds back the tide for now. If the doors remain open for too long, the sand barrier will break, and all of Old Aperture will flood." Came a monotone voice from inside the door. The voice was emphasized by a high-pitched chirping noise.

Chell walked inside, seeing to her surprise, the Fact Core who had helped her stop Wheatley, hooked up to a panel marked 'Drydock Control'. Next to him was a beat-up looking turret-cube. With a grinding noise, the doors resealed, cutting off the noise of the waves.

"Fact: there is now a back door to the Aperture Science facility. You can leave through the drydock whenever you wish. However, when no one is passing through, it must be sealed to prevent flooding."

The Core was far more focussed than Chell remembered. She nodded to it and raised an eyebrow.

"The Fact Core was put through disk-cleaning by the central AI following the battle against the Moron. It is now only partially corrupt. Its facts are no longer incorrect."

Chell's eyebrows rose.

"If you need any assistance , there is a control board next to the Fact Core so that mute individuals may still communicate with it."

Chell located the keyboard. It was ancient, but it still worked.

'Do you know if Aperture Science ever completed the time-travel device they worked on in the 1950s?' she typed.

"Fact: the time-travel module was completed, but is unpredictable. The Fact Core advises wholly against seeking it. The Fact Core doubts that you will like what you find if you go back."

Chell typed: 'I have to know, Fact. It's been driving me crazy ever since I left.'

"The Fact Core can appreciate this. However, you have been warned."

Chell turned and prepared to descend into the drydock.

"Wait! The Turret Cube designated 'Castor' and 'Pollux' wishes me to transfer a message to you from the Oracle Turret herself."

Chell stopped and turned around. The turret-cube made a twittering noise.

"'When you meet the self you do not know, follow the strangers that you do,

until they lead you to your greatest enemy, who does not know you.'

The Fact Core believes the message of DL-PH will become clear, in time. In accordance with your customs, the Fact Core wishes you good luck."

Chell nodded and, turning around, began climbing down a recessed maintenance ladder on the wall of the dry dock. As she left, she heard the Fact core return to its fact-checking routine.

/

And that's the first chapter. Did anyone else wonder about the 'Trace amounts of time travel' thing? I did, and it led to this. Also, I don't think GLaDOS in ungrateful; and the Fact Core did help get rid of Wheatley. This is my version of her way of thanking him.

As for the turretspeak, it's just stuff like binary and hexcode. It doesn't matter much what it says.


	2. The Device

I am still working on _The Six Cores_. I made some significant progress recently, actually, bringing chapter 5 from 1500 to 5000 words (making it the longest single document I've ever written), but it's still not done. Plus, I'm working on a cover image for it. However, as it remains incomplete, I without further ado present to you the next best thing: Chapter Two of _Trace Amounts of Time Travel._

/

Chell looked at the cracked remains of the enrichment spheres. The final battle with Wheatley must have really done a number on them; they were cracked and shattered, littered with far more modern testing elements like discouragement redirection cubes and broken turrets. Most of the devices in Old Aperture were broken, as well, including the emancipation grills. If she had still got the portal gun, navigation would have been so much simpler, but because she had lost it during the final battle, it was even more difficult than it should have been. Fortunately, she had her long fall boots, which had helped her to get at least down to the 1950s section.

Now, she was faced with the very last stretch before the partially dismantled chamber where she'd originally heard the recording. She fired the grapple at a strut that held up a portal surface which before she had used to return to the beginning of this particular puzzle if she made a mistake.

Climbing up the rope, she reached a series of stairs leading into the chamber. She climbed down them, arriving at a former observation platform. It had served five years ago as her exit from the testing track, and now, thanks to a weighted storage cube that had obliterated the railing. Chell jumped down over the edge and landed in front of a familiar boarded-up door.

As she stood up, a scratchy and damaged-sounding version of Cave Johnson's voice came on.

"KSSSSHHHH of time travel."

That confirmed what she'd suspected. She grabbed onto the boards and tugged them off, the rusted nails and petrified wood protesting loudly. The door itself, surprisingly, wasn't even locked. With a loud creak, it slowly opened. Chell stepped inside. The room was almost completely dark, with tiny amounts of illumination streaming in from cracks in the ceiling and walls, and a single window at the top of the room. The glass had long ago fallen in.

She felt around near the edge of the door and found a large switch. She threw it, and lights flicked on throughout the chamber.

In the center, a platform rose from a sea of goo. The platform was shadowed by a huge apparatus that looked like the power cyclers for the GLaDOS chassis far above, combined with a sort of hybrid between the armor of a personality core, an excursion funnel emitter, and a high energy pellet acceptor. A tiny, flimsy-looking catwalk spanned the drop, crossing onto the platform. The apparatus above was overgrown with huge vines.

Chell stepped across the catwalk and onto the platform. As she did, the catwalk retracted, a button appeared from a hidden recess in the platform, and a new, more intact Cave recording played over hidden speakers.

"Greetings, test subject. Thank you for volunteering to test our time-travel concept, developed by Doctor Craig Gallant. If this works, then he's a personal friend of mine. If not, he's fired. Now, remember, keep your limbs inside the sphere at all times, or else they might get lost in time. Also, remember my warning from outside, about avoiding your past selves. That's something I heard about from a nice fellow I met once called Cave Prime. He was me. Long story. I just wish I'd thought of whatever he thought of, 'cause he was rich. Anyway, good luck, and if I've been born yet when you arrive, make sure to tell me that this worked."

Chell was starting to remember how little sanity Cave Johnson had possessed, and why she'd been so anxious to leave Aperture in the first place. But it would be a shame to come all this way for nothing, so she pressed the button.

The apparatus hummed. Nothing else happened. Chell turned around in disappointment, and walked toward the door. But then she stopped dead.

The vines that draped the apparatus had bore beautiful red-and-white tulip-like flowers. But now, they curled in on each other, became buds, and disappeared. Seeds shot up out of rotting wood on the edge of the base platform, disappeared into dry, brown husks on the vines, which turned vibrant and green. Bits of brown dust on the platform fused into red-and-white flower petals and one by one flew back onto the vines, forming flowers again around the pods. Then those flowers shrank into buds and disappeared. This cycle repeated itself rapidly, increasing in speed until it could barely be seen, but instead, the vines were rapidly growing backwards. After a few moments, the vines receded into seeds, and shot up into the air in balls of fuzzy stuff that disappeared into the mouths of a flock of owls that flew through cracks in the roof backwards.

Then, the goo at the bottom of the chamber dripped rapidly upward, seemingly shooting through the cracks in the chamber roof and away. The walls and roof sealed themselves, signs of moisture damage vanishing from the plasterboard. Glass flew up from the base of the chamber and fixed itself to the window. Cracks in the glass sealed one by one. The rotted edges of the wooden platform resealed themselves into petrified, discolored wood, on which peeling paint suddenly appeared and spread itself over the entire platform. Then, events began to slow down again. Eventually, dust scurried in clouds from the floor, collecting back into the ceiling, followed by a huge flash from above.

_That was the first time I killed GLaDOS,_ realized Chell. _All that stuff I just saw happened since then?_

Only a few seconds seemed to pass before the humming stopped and the room stopped changing. It was still clearly fairly old, the paint peeling slightly at the edge of the platform (Aperture white). There were tiny stains at the edges of the plasterboard ceiling, looking like something that might have been goo or coffee, or at Aperture, perhaps both. Cave Johnson hadn't been above testing his strange inventions on his employees.

The catwalk was still extended. Chell walked across it and tried to open the door, but it was jammed.

_Of course,_ she thought, _I haven't removed the boards yet._

She kicked at the door, and with a bang it swung open, the boards and their almost new-looking nails cracking and falling away. She walked out into the 1950s testing track. It was dilapidated, and unused. That indicated that at least she had arrived later than the fifties.

Using her long fall boots as weapons, she managed to crack apart a piece of the track's wall. With the assistance of the grappling crossbow, she managed to skip the tests, which was good due to her lack of a portal device. It was practically just as dangerous, though, because of the fact that goo had still collected in the base of the sphere, and the crossbow was a lot more difficult to navigate with than a portal gun.

Eventually, she made it to the edge of the enrichment sphere, again using her long fall boots to crack a hole in the asbestos covering of the sphere. She climbed through and found herself at the exit from 50s Aperture, the hall with the Cave Johnson portrait at the end. And the door to the elevator shaft was unblocked.

She walked into the elevator, noting that the carpeting which, when she had last been through had been dull, faded, and stank of mold, was now blood-red and practically shining.

The elevator, unlike the ones that she'd usually encountered in Aperture, was operated from the inside, by a large switch on the reverse side. She walked up to it and pulled it. There was a series of disconcerting clanks and groans as the whole apparatus started up again, but eventually, it rose slowly and steadily to the top of the shaft. It was such a distance that the recorded music in the background had time to play all of _Blue Suede Shoes,_ _Love Me Tender, _and most of_ Hey, Jude. _Chell knew the song names from somewhere, and knew that she liked the songs, but didn't know where or why.

After that time, the elevator doors opened with a ding. Chell stepped out. She was about to proceed further into the facility when she suddenly thought of something.

Looking around, she saw a leather bag hanging from a hook in the elevator. She grabbed it and hid her long fall boots and crossbow inside it. It wouldn't do to have people see her with test subject equipment, or for that matter with a deadly crossbow. She pushed the bag up onto her shoulder and walked down the corridor deeper into Aperture Labs.

She found it odd that there were no scientists around. She hoped that GLaDOS wasn't in charge yet, because that could spell disaster or even temporal paradox.

Suddenly, she turned a corner and almost tripped over a little girl walking in the other direction.

"Hey, miss! Who are you?" asked the little girl.

Chell pointed to her mouth and shook her head.

"Oh, you can't speak? That sucks. I'm Clara. My daddy works at Aperture! Where do you work? Oh, right, mute, sorry."

Chell pointed to Clara herself and raised an eyebrow questioningly.

"Are you asking me what I'm doing here?"

Chell nodded.

"Didn't you know? It's Aperture's first Bring-your-daughter-to-work day!"


	3. Save Yourself

A memory flashed through Chell's head, from her travels with Wheatley: _Bring your daughter to work day. That did _not_ end well._ A row of science project backboards, standing behind a row of abandoned projects, potatoes rotting and a baking soda volcano surrounded by a crust of dried baking soda. An even earlier memory of GLaDOS before Chell had known her to be a computer, saying, _remember, the Aperture Science Bring your Daughter to Work day is the perfect time to have her tested._

Clara looked up at Chell. "You don't look too good. Are you feeling OK?"

Chell nodded, but really, she was at the verge of turning back right then. The last thing she wanted was to meet GLaDOS before the installation of the Morality Core. She didn't know much about BYDTW day, but she did know that it had been the day GLaDOS had been activated, and then promptly deactivated due to her attempts to kill everyone. She decided at the last moment to try at least to fulfill the Oracle Turret's prediction.

She didn't know much about the Oracle Turret, but she did know that it didn't lie, and had a strange ability to predict outcomes. If it had predicted that she would see herself, she had no reason to doubt it.

Clara turned around. "I'd better get back to the kids' room. The supervisor might miss me soon, but I just had to look around more."

Chell followed. Clara giggled, but then pretended not to notice.

It was a surprisingly short walk to the room, which looked considerably brighter now than it would in the distant future when she walked through with Wheatley; for example, there was no dust, and the potatoes still generated energy. There was a group of children playing on the floor. There was also a group of slightly older children sitting in a group of chairs and talking to each other. And then there was a teenage girl sitting in a chair by the door, reading a magazine.

Clara walked up to her. "Michelle, where did the supervisors go?"

The other girl set down the magazine, and Chell gasped soundlessly. Her face was a younger version of Chell's own. The girl's hair was shorter, and fell straight down instead of being tied back in a haphazard ponytail. Also, the myriad of scars that had been etched across her face by Wheatley's 'Part Five' was missing. That was a piece of good luck, as the scars prevented past-Chell from recognising her future self and erasing all of time.

"I don't know, Clara. They said there was something important going on downstairs and left me in charge up here. I'm just supposed to watch the door and make sure nobody leaves the room until they get back. Say, who's this?" she asked, looking up at future-Chell.

Clara looked back. "She can't talk. But she's nice! Honest!"

"Is she a test subject? Clara, didn't your father warn you against going near the product testing areas?"

"I didn't! She was over by the office area!"

"Clara! Somehow I doubt she got those scars in a cubicle. Now, did you meet her near the testing cubes? Are you a test subject?" she asked Chell directly.

Chell shook her head. _Not yet, anyway,_ she thought.

"Hmm. I don't recognise you, though. All right, I guess you can hang around until your supervisor picks you up." Michelle shrugged and went back to her magazine.

Chell sighed in relief (silently, of course) and looked around. If the Oracle turret continued its accuracy streak, she would soon meet 'the strangers that she knew'.

True enough, in a few moments a man in a lab coat tore around the corner, attempted to swerve rapidly to avoid crashing into Michelle, tripped over his own shoelace and fell face first into a pool of foam at the base of the desk bearing the volcano experiment. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, wiping his lopsided glasses with a tissue he removed from his pocket.

"Sorry! Excuse me, sorry. Didn't see you there, 'Chell. Sorry." He spoke in a familiar British accent. His light brown hair was poorly combed, and his sky-blue eyes were magnified to awkward proportions by his glasses. He was only slightly older than Michelle. A year, maximum, by Chell's estimation.

Chell's suspicions were confirmed when Michelle said to him, "That's perfectly all right, Wheatley. Do you know what's going on downstairs?"

_Wheatley? Really?_ Thought Chell. _Well, he's a stranger I know. Human Wheatley. Wow, what happened?_

"Nope. They just said, be there, because this might be the single most important moment of our careers. And if I miss the single most important, what happens to the other moments?"

Another man walked in after Wheatley. "I know what it is. But it's madness. I can't think of a single worse thing they could do, or a worse time to do it."

"Doug, there are worse things than the most important thing. And they call _me_ a moron."

The new guy, also wearing an Aperture Science lab coat, had well-kept hair in clear contrast to Wheatley's. He had a set of painting equipment hanging from one hand, and to Chell's surprise, a Companion Cube attached to his back with a jury-rigged harness.

Michelle looked at the cube. "Dr. Rattman, I've been meaning to ask you. Why do you take that thing everywhere?"

Rattman looked at her. "Sometimes, it feels like the only thing in this entire company that listens to me." The girls in the other corner of the room scooted their chairs slightly further away from him and started whispering to each other.

_Wait._ Thought Chell. _Rattman? The Rat Man?_ A mysterious person known to her only as 'the Rat Man' had left cryptic paintings throughout the testing track on her first journey through Aperture. They had helped her to realize that the cake promised her by GLaDOS was a lie, among other things. She'd never seen the man himself, but one of his paintings had depicted a scientist that looked a lot like this man, but with a beard.

A common motif among the paintings had also been the companion cube.

Wheatley stood up, dusting himself off. Or trying to. He at least flipped over his ID badge, revealing himself to be an intern. "Are you coming or not? Because we may or may not be late. I didn't actually catch what time we're supposed to, ah, be there."

"Were you even paying attention at that meeting, Wheatley?"

"Yes! Sort of! No! Not really."

"Well, I'm not going personally. But I can take you as far as the AI chamber."

"And what exactly makes you so sure I need to be told where to go?" said Wheatley with the same certainty he'd shown when guiding Chell to the neurotoxin generator.

"Because I saw you going upstairs from Basement Level Thirty. The AI chamber is on Basement Level Fifty-One."

"Ah. Yes, I knew that. Right. So, um, Level 51. I guess I'll let you show... Um. Right." His face was steadily turning bright red.

_The AI chamber? Wheatley was involved with creating HER?_

The two employees said goodbye to the children. Michelle caught Wheatley before he stepped out the door, and Chell overheard their conversation:

"Wheatley, is my mother going to be there?"

"I don't see why not. Must be an important thing for her even more than the rest of us, her being the CEO and all."

"Could you tell her that we want to be involved in whatever this is, too?"

"Sure, luv."

That piece of information more than anything surprised Chell. It indicated that none other than Caroline was her mother, shining new light on several incidents where the consciousness of Caroline briefly rose to the surface.

Then the slightly wider implications hit her, and she realised that technically, GLaDOS was her mother. She realized her mouth was hanging open, and closed it before anyone noticed.

She picked up the bag containing her stuff and felt confident enough to nod to her past self before following Doug and Wheatley.

Even if there had been a throng of people in the hallways, it wouldn't have been difficult to follow the two. Mostly because of Doug's companion cube, which stood out strongly, but also because at least one in every fifty steps taken by Wheatley tripped over something. Chell counted.

Suddenly, they passed through a doorframe, which sealed behind them. Chell nearly ran into it.

She pounded on the door in frustration. _Damn!_ It was one of the same types used in test chambers, and brought back bad memories to say the least. She looked around for a keypad. Finding none, she looked for other similar items around the door. Eventually, she found the key.

A full body scanner, mounted on top of the door. When she stood a certain distance from the threshold, a matrix of blue lasers flashed out and scanned Chell. When complete, the door beeped angrily and did nothing. She looked for an alternate way in.

Suddenly, music floated through the air. It sounded familiar. Chell looked for its source. She saw at first only white Aperture walls, but then she noticed an air vent from which the music poured.

She approached the air vent. The music was rising in pitch, and suddenly she remembered where she recognised it from. It was the instrumental version of the Italian opera that the turrets had sung for her as she'd left Aperture. The version that had been played by...

Companion Cubes.

Without further hesitation, she removed the vent cover and crawled in, following the music of what she was now certain was Doug's companion cube.

She coughed. The vents were full of dust and cobwebs and God knows what else. She resolved to stay in the vent for as short a time as possible.

The music echoed hauntingly within the vent system, to a point that she could no longer tell where it was coming from, or even that it was 'Cara Mia'. Suddenly realizing that she was lost, she panicked. This was nothing like a test chamber. She couldn't analyse it to see where to go. She could barely even see where she'd came from.

Crawling blindly through the air ducts, she crashed into a few walls, and she didn't doubt that she confused a great deal of people below. Suddenly, with a loud crashing and banging, the section of vent in which she knelt came away from the rest of the system.

She froze, certain she'd just dropped into a top secret conference room or some such. When nobody looked into the metal box that had just dropped from the ceiling, she cautiously poked her head out.

"Hello."

Just her luck. The voice was high, childlike, and familiar. She closed her eyes and waited for the hail of bullets that she was sure was coming.

"I'm different!"

It took her a while to comprehend what she'd just heard. Once she did, she would have laughed with relief had she possessed functioning vocal chords. It was just the Oracle Turret. She stood and turned around, noticing as she did that she had indeed come down in some sort of conference room, though it looked to be one that hadn't been used in months, if not years. The rotating chairs were coated with dust and cobwebs. The Oracle Turret itself rested comically in the chair at the head of the table, its back leg going through the hole at the back of the chair.

As she watched, it put out its left gun attachment, causing it to rotate rapidly clockwise, shouting, "Whee!" The sight was among the most hilarious things that she ever remembered seeing, including Potato GLaDOS.

As it came to face her again, it extended its gun barrels long enough to stop itself, and then retracted them again.

"H.G. Wells." It said.

Chell raised an eyebrow. Of course, from the moment she heard the words 'I'm Different' she knew she probably wouldn't understand a word the Oracle said, but she remembered seeing a stack of books by one H.G. Wells. One of them was 'The Time Machine'.

So, the oracle could tell she was from the future. What else was new?

"The answer might be beneath us. It depends."

That was new. An ambiguous statement. Generally the Oracle knew anything and everything, even if it didn't state so clearly. It never admitted to not knowing what would happen.

"He will choke on his success or take revenge for his failure. You will see."

_What? _Even for DL-PH, this was difficult to interpret. Who was 'he'? And why was the Turret not being certain?

"'As you approach the singularity, variables multiply exponentially. It is impossible to extrapolate with any certainty.'"

And that was even stranger, coming from the Oracle turret. It was a straight answer, or at least almost.

"Greek mythology. The hero's doom often stems from their one fatal flaw. Hubris, or even excessive loyalty. It won't be enough."

Mythology. A staple of the Oracle. And vice versa, but Chell didn't consider that at the time. Instead, she noted his use of 'it won't be enough': the phrase he would use to attempt to warn her against installing Wheatley. Perhaps he didn't know quite what time in the future she'd come from.

The tune of 'Cara Mia' filtered down from the pipes above. The turret, to Chell's surprise, began to sing along.

"Perché non passi lontana, sì, lontana da scienza? Hmm hmm, hmm hmm-mm..."

It was a segment about midway through the song. It was easier for Chell to understand the words in the voice of the Oracle than the Soprano, but she still didn't know what the words meant. Knowing GLaDOS, it was probably insulting to some degree.

The oracle turret concluded its hummed rendition of the tune and spun around again. "The Singularity awaits. Twice have you cheated the house. Once more, or will you fold?" It pointed vaguely with its malfunctioning target beam to the door behind Chell.

She turned around and approached the door. She put her hand on the knob and turned it slowly, listening to the unoiled mechanism squeaking.

"Your heart is the reset button." The Oracle looked straight ahead, unconcerned with anything. "That's all I can say. Goodbye!"

_That sounds more like a fable. It's like he's telling me to 'listen to my heart' or something. I wonder if there's some sort of command sequence to make them talk in a way we can understand?_

With that, she pushed the door open and stepped outside. She was on a giant metal catwalk, overlooking a much larger room. She looked down.

It was the GLaDOS chamber. In its old form, the way it had appeared during her first fight with the murderous AI. But it was still different.

For one, there was a huge group of scientists assembled in the room. Two other men stood on the catwalk that had wrapped around the GLaDOS chassis. They were shown in much greater detail on the screens that surrounded the chassis. One looked like a younger, healthier Cave Johnson, but with shoulder-length hair that looked almost as if it had been bleached blond. The man couldn't pull off the look at all, but clearly he insisted on wearing it, along with a much more modern business suit than Cave had worn. The second had neatly combed pure white hair, slicked down to his head with either a copious amount of hair gel or a recent shower. Unlike the other, he wore a white lab coat, without the tiniest speck of dirt on it, perfectly matching his almost bleached skin colour. This man, Chell decided, was Aperture through-and-through. When he looked at the camera, she noticed that underneath his horn-rimmed glasses his eyes were bright pink.

_He's an albino, _she thought.

The bleach-head was gripping the albino tightly by the shoulder, beaming broadly to the crowd. The albino, on the other hand, was sweating nervously and visibly, looking around like a trapped rat.

At that moment, Wheatley stumbled through the doors. He stumbled because this step had happened to catch on the door, threatening to tip him over completely. He recovered and tried to join the crowd surreptitiously.

The bleach-head looked at him and said through the microphone, "Wheatley. Is there anyone else late?"

Wheatley mumbled something.

The bleach-head replied, "Well, his loss. I suppose we can get started right now." He adjusted his tie and grinned even more broadly. "Now, as you all know, my name is Cliff Gregory Johnson, the nephew of our late founder. I kindly request that you refer to me as 'Greg'. And today, we are witnessing the unveiling of Aperture Science's greatest project since the Dual Portal Device." He gestured grandly to the inert GLaDOS chassis. "The world's first true Artificial Intelligence. And of course, with my help, this was made possible by Craig Gallant here." He pushed the albino forward, who then waved nervously. Some in the audience applauded for him.

"Now, many, including Black Mesa, have said that AI is impossible. But we found the solution! The solution is simply this..." Greg pulled a lever at his side, and a tarp fell away from an odd-looking apparatus beneath the chassis, like a fusion of a dentist's chair and a birdcage. It was attached by a series of thick wires to the chassis above. Greg continued, "A template mind. A human intelligence is scanned and then uploaded to the machine, giving us an intelligent computer, or 'A.I.'"

Some applauded. Some just scratched their heads, which Chell found a little odd. On the other hand, she had already heard about how Caroline would become GLaDOS. Perhaps it was just clearer to her for that reason.

"Now, some of you may be asking, 'but Greg, who is going to be the template?' We solved that problem too. We found an old recording in the basement containing my uncle's last wishes, and among them was this bit." He pressed a button on a remote, and a familiar voice started talking over the speakers. It was Cave Johnson's, but heavily edited from the original recording that Chell had heard on the testing tracks.

"I want Caroline to run this place. Now, she'll say she can't, but you _make her._ Hell, put her in my computer."

Greg shut off the recording. "Now, given that these recordings were also what inspired us to create AI, we naturally drew the line of his intent. Gentlemen, bring her in."

A set of doors opened, and two security guards stepped in holding Caroline firmly by the shoulders. She had aged since the only depiction of her Chell had ever seen, but she was still obviously the same person. She made no attempt to run, but judging by a tear in the shoulder of her dress, she had tried. Now that Chell was aware that Caroline was her mother, seeing her treated thusly filled her with almost as much frustration as seeing GLaDOS crush Wheatley.

"Caroline. It's nice to see you." Said Greg, still smiling.

Caroline said something back. Chell couldn't hear what it was, but obviously it was something against Greg. The audience chuckled quietly, and for the first time, the smile was wiped off Greg's face.

Greg leaned over and whispered something. Then he stood up, the smile back on his face, and announced, "Now. Let us begin! Please place the template in the Human Intelligence Bay."

The two guards pushed Caroline roughly over to the apparatus, blocking Chell's view of the operation. She ran around the catwalk, which encircled the entire chamber, but came up against a giant cable that ran into the wall. There was no way past it. She turned around and looked back at the chair. The guards had stepped away, leaving Caroline apparently strapped down to the chair. As Chell looked on, the birdcage-like segment flipped up and encased her head.

A series of sky-blue lasers flickered around the interior of the device, apparently scanning her head.

_Is that all?_ Thought Chell. _Just a brain scan? Was the real Caroline never directly put into GLaDOS?_

Then stage two began. A cable snaked up from the bundle at the base of the device, revealing a wicked spike at the tip.

Greg was narrating the whole process. "...And here, you see, this is the direct neural uplink. It will interface directly with the brain stem, cataloguing a map of Caroline's neural impulses, which will then be transmitted to a new, mechanical net."

Some of the audience were starting to mumble amongst each other. Clearly, they were almost as uncomfortable with the situation as Chell was.

Chell traced the cable with her eyes. It coiled around the base of the apparatus, then rose up to the chassis where it joined with hundreds of other similar cables, twisting around to the ceiling and then running flush to it all the way to the wall.

Next to her. It, and all the other cables coming from the apparatus, joined together into a huge 'master' cable which was strung across the ceiling and plugged into the wall right next to her.

She jumped to the cable, trying to get a better grip on it. Failing that, due to its huge thickness, she turned to the wall around the edge. There it was, a huge release lever marked 'do not pull: GLaDOS power supply'. _I can think of at least three times this would have been useful,_ she thought.

She looked back to the chamber below. The brain spike was just about to ram itself into the back of Caroline's neck. Without even taking the time to turn around, she pulled the lever.

With the whirring sound of dying machinery, the whole thing shut down. The brain spike cable dropped back to the floor as the master cable slumped slightly in its housing, losing contact with the outlet.

Greg's smile slowly dropped off his face. "What happened?" he asked quietly, his words picked up by the microphone.

Craig returned almost as quietly, "I don't know. I told you we should have waited. We ran too few simulations..."

Greg's voice started rising again. "You've been working on this nonstop for months. How many god-damn simulations do you have to run?"

"I didn't want to do this in the first place," whispered Craig. "This is unethical. She wouldn't have survived!"

"Yes she would. As a god damn immortal computer! You call yourself a scientist?" Greg was shouting now. Chell could hear him even without the microphone. "This isn't results! Every time you screw up like this, Black Mesa steals something else from under our noses. God damn it, Craig! At this rate, you're going to be the ruin of me!" He was changed completely from a few moments ago. His face was bright red, and on the monitors (which apparently operated on an external power supply, like the mic) Chell could see spittle flying from his lips as he shouted at Craig. "This could have made me famous, across the entire world! Now _you_ screwed it up, and I am forever stuck under my uncle's shadow!" At that moment, he directly lost control and swung his fist at Craig, knocking him over the railing to the floor.

Greg gave a loud, aggravated sigh. Chell ran back down the catwalk, to a point further back where a set of stairs led further down. Greg, too, ran down the stairs of the chassis catwalk while the audience started rushing out the doors. Clearly, they'd seen Greg do something like this before.

The sole exception was running toward the center of the room, and with a shock Chell realized that it was Wheatley. Craig stood up and limped over to the apparatus. Chell made it to the lowest catwalk she could reach in the room, which overlooked the exit hallway, considerably larger than she remembered.

Craig fumbled with the restraints on the device. With a click, the head cage flicked open, then the left wrist restraint.

Wheatley reached the device at the same time Greg did. Greg took a swing at Wheatley, but Wheatley tripped over one of the cables surrounding the base of the device and accidentally headbutted Greg in the stomach.

They both went down, giving Craig the opportunity to unfasten the left foot restraint. Caroline rolled over and pulled at her right wrist restraint.

"Damn it! Traitors!" yelled Greg from the floor, trying to rise. Wheatley had halready stood and was helping Craig release Caroline's right ankle. As he did so, he accidentally stood on Greg's face, pushing the gradually more maddened manager back to the floor.

The last restraint clicked away, and Caroline stood up and backed away from the device. The three ran for the exit, hotly pursued by Greg. He was yelling into a handheld radio.

He was catching up. Chell knew she had to do something, so she looked through the leather bag in which she'd stored her equipment. She pulled out the crossbow, and a single non-grapple bolt that she had brought in case she needed to defend herself.

She aimed the crossbow just like her trusty portal gun, shooting as the group passed by. With a yell of rage, Greg dropped to the floor, writhing in pain, the bolt protruding from his kneecap. Blood sprayed over the floor. He yelled into his radio, "Catch them, damn it! Caroline, Doctor Gallant, and his intern! They sabotaged the AI project!"

Chell ran through the door, onto a set of stairs that sloped down to the hallway. The small group wasn't difficult to catch up with, given that Craig was limping and Wheatley had difficulty running without tripping over something. When she did get near them, though, Caroline pivoted on her heel, bringing a fist around towards Chell's face.

Chell ducked, raising her hands in surrender.

Wheatley put a hand on Caroline's shoulder, preventing her from swinging again. "Who are you?" he asked Chell. "I saw you up at the childrens' room. Where'd you get those scars?"

Chell pointed to her mouth, trying for the third time that day to explain wordlessly that she physically couldn't answer that question. Craig looked around, from shoulder to shoulder, and then said, "In here!" He ushered them into a nearby room, apparently abandoned, and handed Chell a pencil and paper. "Here. You can write, right?"

Chell nodded. She started writing on the paper, and then showed it to the other three. _Test Subject 1498. From future. Long story. Craig's machine._

Wheatley and Caroline looked understandably skeptical. Craig's jaw dropped.

"The temporal reverse loop? But that was a critical failure! Nobody ever came back!"

Chell wrote, _Just goes too far. From pretty distant future. Questions or running?_

"Wait, you still haven't given reason for us to trust you. We can't let you follow us until you do." Wheatley planted himself firmly in front of the door as he said this.

Chell rolled her eyes. _Unplugged machine, kneecapped Greg. Crossbow out of bolts, though. So run now?_

Caroline raised her eyebrows. "That's going to turn nasty. I knew Greg once. He's like a dog with a bone. Once something frustrates him, he's not stopping until he's had someone grind it into dust."

There was the sound or running feet from outside the door. A fist pounded on the glass. Craig ran and pressed a button next to the door, sealing it. "Damn!" he said. "That was the fastest way by far to the surface!"

Wheatley swallowed. "But there are other ways, right?"

Caroline answered. "Yes, of course. But the only other way goes through the Aperture Science Astronomy department. There are people there at all hours of every day."

"Oh. That's not good. I guess we're stuck here, then? How long is that window going to hold? Because I don't think-"

"Wheatley, shhh. We need a plan of some sort. We're not staying here forever. Craig and I are going to go think it over." Caroline took Craig over to the map posted on the wall, and they started pointing to various points on the floor plan.

"So, you're from the future, huh? What's it like?" asked Wheatley.

Chell wrote, _Civilization as you know it gone. Aperture still essentially operating under the iron claw of a sadistic supercomputer which I just stopped the creation of._ As an afterthought, she scratched out everything after 'operating' and wrote instead _can't say more. Paradox concerns._

"Oh. Huh. That's too bad. Um, what happened to wipe out civilization?"

Chell drew a rough sketch of the Black Mesa logo.

"Right. What did they do? Build a doomsday device?"

_More paradox. Can't risk the collapse of time._

"Fair enough. Fair enough. At least tell me where you got those scars. There's got to be an interesting story there, and it can't do the timeline any harm."

Chell thought telling Wheatley that the condition of her face was his fault might just be even worse than explaining the Resonance Cascade. Instead, she simply wrote _Part 5. It could._

"Part five? Of what?"

_The four-part plan._

"What? How can there be a fifth part to a four-part plan? And a plan to do what, anyway? Did it have something to do with the collapse of civilization?"

Chell underlined the word _paradox _and the phrase _can't say_. Then, debating how much to reveal, wrote underneath _Strictly Aperture business. Not testing._

"Arrgh! It frustrates me not to know stuff. Sure, there's a good reason, but... rrgh!"

Craig walked over. "Nothing on the map. Not even air vent access. The only option is to try and sneak through the Astronomy wing. Hopefully the stargazers will be too absorbed in their work to notice us. Then after that, Caroline says we're not leaving without her daughter, so we'll have to sneak back around upstairs to rescue Michelle before Greg thinks to send security after her."

Chell nodded. If one thing was certain, it was that she wasn't going to let her past self get killed by Greg.

/

The astronomy department looked strange for an observatory. There were no telescopes, for one, but the astronomers stood on floating platforms throughout the room, apparently building a scale hard-light replica of the entire known universe. Giant holographic screens hummed around them, transmitting the latest data from every observatory around the world, and apparently some of Aperture's own telescopes at various points around the world.

The astronomers muttered to themselves as they worked, saying such odd things as, "Parallax, point zero three arcseconds." Or "Perihelion, point zero three astronomical units." They were completely oblivious to the group moving about below them, and if they had noticed them, they seemed so engrossed that they might not even care.

The room was massive indeed, but still galaxies stretched off as far as the eye could see, providing eerie light in the darkened room. This was fortunate, as it hid them from the Aperture Science security guards who were wandering the room looking for them. It was unfortunate, however, because they also ended up getting lost.

They walked underneath an astronomer, who was glancing from screen to screen in rapid motion, muttering to himself and flicking stars and galaxies every which way. As the objects landed in their desired location, they shrank to actual scale and in many cases shrank out of visibility. They could hear him muttering, "Potato nebula, parallax point quadruple-zero thirteen arcseconds. Location, Triangulum. Scale, two thousand light years across." He threw a large, reddish cloud of gas off to his left, where it shrank to approximately the size of an actual potato. What struck Chell was that the astronomer above couldn't have been more than twelve years old.

She pointed this out to Craig, using the light of a passing quasar to illuminate the paper.

"That's Kevin." He whispered back. "He's our best and brightest, even better than me at his age. Pity his genius only extends to applied astrophysics. Still, he already has his PHD in that."

Kevin threw a stellar remnant into the potato nebula, where it shrank to about the size of a dime. Looking at the result, Chell was suddenly reminded of POTaDOS and had to fight off the urge to laugh out loud despite the dire situation.

"Come on!" whispered Caroline. "We have to get out of here. Every second we spend lost is another second that Greg has to capture Michelle."

Suddenly, there was a clicking noise. A deep voice shouted, "Freeze!"

There was a security guard behind them, standing in a large empty spot in the universe. He was pointing his gun at them, alternating between each one.

Wheatley put his hands up and ducked a little, while Chell leveled her crossbow at the guard. Craig stepped in front of Caroline and elbowed Wheatley in the ribs, causing him to flinch, then join Craig.

"I don't want to hurt you. Just come with me and we'll get this all resolved nicely." The guard looked at Chell, focussing his gun on her. "I know you're bluffing, test subject. I pulled your bolt out of Greg's knee myself. Now, I'm going to give you one last chance." He cocked the pistol.

From above the seemingly indifferent child-genius astronomer continued, "Antennae galaxies. Location, Corvus. Distance, 55 million light years. Size, 350 thousand light years. He threw a small white boomerang-like speck, which swelled suddenly to the scale equivalent of three hundred and fifty thousand light years.

It collided with the security guard, snaring him firmly in one of its two loops. It rose up off the floor, occupying the space in which the guard had formerly stood while holding him immobile off the ground.

Kevin's platform descended. "I couldn't help overhearing you. You sounded like you need a little assistance. Quick, get on. I can help you get away, and don't worry about him. The other astrocartographers will find him eventually, and he'll be fine. But now we have to move."

They stepped onto the platform. It was a little crowded, especially considering the fact that Wheatley backed as far away from the edge as he could the moment it rose into the air.

"Really? You overheard us?" asked Craig. "You seemed so engrossed in your work."

"Sure, it seemed that way. But we're always listening. You never know. And sure, this is probably the best job in the world, but morality takes precedence. Anyway, as long as we're travelling, and going to be doing so for some time, you may as well explain to me why that security guard was after you."

He looked at Chell, who was surprised by the fact that his eyes were bright yellow.

_No way._ She thought. _Space? He seems so normal. Well, not compared to real normal people, but compared to how he was when I knew him._ She suddenly realized something else: if core optic color was based on the eye color of the human template, then it was possible that Craig might be the Fact Core. She looked at him again. He was busy explaining the events of that day to Kevin. _Is it possible? They both seem so different from the cores. But, if true, it raises the interesting question: Where is Rick, the Adventure Core? As a human, he could be really helpful if he's anything like the core version of himself._

They arrived at a swirling, spiral shaped galaxy, approximately the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and descended to the floor. Kevin stepped over to the galaxy and reached into it, coming out with a single star, the size of a sesame seed, which swelled in his hand to the size of a grapefruit. It was bright yellow, and several orbits traced their way around it.

"Makes you feel quite tiny, doesn't it?" said Kevin, holding out the star.

"What do you mean?" asked Wheatley, clearly relieved not to have to stand on the platform any more.

Kevin held out his hand in one of the orbital lines and waited a moment. When he removed it, a tiny pinprick of light rested on his palm. As he cast the star back into the galaxy, the pinprick swelled to the size of an exercise ball and hovered in front of Kevin, spinning slowly.

It was a hard-light representation of Earth. The continents were picked out in real color, the green of forests in Africa contrasting with the prismatic ice of Antarctica and the scale representation of the seafloor, lying dark under transparent water. As the US rotated in front of Kevin, he touched a tiny point in the southern area, which enlarged into a topographical map of what appeared to be a wheat field.

_It's Aperture,_ realized Chell.

Underneath the surface, a huge object appeared picked out in red, looking like a huge jellyfish, with a large blob on top and countless long, thin columns extending from the base.

"This is Aperture," announced Kevin. "Very few employees know about this failsafe. You see, any and all of Aperture Science's functions can be operated from this control panel. I can move test chambers, activate the neurotoxin release, even reverse lockdowns. It's also the only device which can open the surface-shot elevator. One, maybe two of you should go get Michelle, and be as quick as you can. We're all traitors to Greg now, or at least from his point of view, so we have to get out of Aperture ASAP. Hang on, I'll call the elevator to her level."

He reached into the holographic representation of Aperture, touching a series of locations on the map. A light appeared on the representation, dropping into the room near them at the same time an elevator hissed down from the ceiling into their midst.

"Whoever's going, go now. I can track your location on this map, and when you're ready to get back, I'll prepare the surface elevator."

Caroline stepped forward. "She's my daughter. I'm going."

"Fair enough," said Wheatley. "Then I'm going too. Greg's not getting his hands on either of them."

Chell was rather surprised. Wheatley, too, was different from his core form. She stepped forward, scribbling on her pad of paper, and then showed it to the others by the light of the Aperture simulation.

_I'm going too. I have a vested interest in keeping her safe, which I'll keep to myself for reasons I've already explained._

Caroline looked at her suspiciously. Wheatley, on the other hand, clapped his hands and announced, "Alright. That's that, then. Craig, Kevin, you two can take care of yourselves, right?"

"Of course," said Kevin. "We have the universe down here. Good luck."

The three stepped into the elevator. It hummed up into the darkness, accelerating through several levels before stopping at the end of a single long hallway. A security patrol (evidently unaware of the events on Level 51) stepped past, waving cheerily to them.

The three stepped out of the hallway, moving carefully down its length. Chell noticed that the cameras were all dead in their housings, something that she decided had probably been done by Kevin with his control board. At the far end of the hallway, they found the children's room, filled with the daughters of various employees, completely unaware of the events below.

Caroline ran up to Michelle, embracing her and whispering hurriedly. Wheatley looked back down the hallway that they'd come from, twiddling his thumbs nervously. Chell, on the other hand, watched the proceedings before her. The younger girls were looking on curiously.

Wheatley turned back. "Miss Caroline. We need to go. We don't have much time. 'Chell, explanations need to wait. 1498 - you don't mind if I call you that, do you? Since you won't give me your real name. Anyway, 1498, you can keep an eye out for security for a second? I-"

He never got to finish his thought. At that moment, an arm snaked out from behind the doorframe and wrapped around his shoulders. A second arm came out wielding a gun, which the person cocked next to Wheatley's ear. Then the person came around the corner in his entirety. It was, of course, a security guard.

The guard was some six feet tall, with tanned skin and dark hair, which came down just short of obscuring his bright green eyes. He had an outdoors quality to him, as if he'd much prefer his job if it took place far away from civilization. He would have been attractive if it wasn't for the fact that he was pointing a gun at Wheatley. Michelle and Caroline stood up quickly, backing against the wall.

"Easy there, ladies. Don't wanna have to harm your boyfriend here." His voice had a Southern accent, but not so thick as to sound ridiculous. In fact, Chell thought it sounded familiar.

"He's not my boyfriend," said Michelle.

At the same time, Wheatley mumbled something along the lines of, "not her boyfriend," his voice trailing off near the end.

The security guard looked around at the assembled children. "You all had better clear out for the moment. Might get a little dangerous here." The children complied, some younger ones starting to cry.

"God damn it, Rick," said Caroline. "You know me. Am I any sort of saboteur?"

_Rick?_ Thought Chell. _Is that... _She looked more closely, and listened. _It is! That's the voice, the exact voice. Damn. I hoped we could have him on our side._

"Well, Miss Caroline. I don't know about _know you_, now. I'm just doing this to pay my way to adventure. So, Mister Greg says _apprehend the saboteurs_ and I say _Where_? In all seriousness, though, this is the most excitement I've seen in ten years at this job. So are you going to come quietly or am I going to have to Vulcan Nerve Pinch every one of you?"

"We're damn well _not_ coming quietly. Run!" yelled Wheatley, at the same time kicking at the space behind him where he apparently thought Rick was standing. Unfortunately, Rick was not in fact standing there, and Wheatley succeeded only in stumbling to the floor, whereupon Rick put his knee in the small of Wheatley's back, preventing him from rising, while covering the other three with his weapon.

Caroline laughed. "'Mister' Greg? Since when has he been 'Mister'?"

"Since fifteen minutes ago. You've been replaced, darlin'. We answer to Greg now." He gestured with his gun to Chell, indicating that she should join Caroline and Michelle. She moved over to them carefully.

"Now, you're all just goin' to march all quiet-like down to Mister Greg's office. You too, Wheatley. Have I got'cha word you'll go quietly if I let you up?"

Wheatley's face was pressed into the coffee-stained carpet, so he couldn't manage much more than mumbling.

Rick was opening his mouth to repeat his question when a large, heavy object flew out of the hallway, clouting him in the back of the head. He rolled off Wheatley, unconscious.

Michelle ran to help Wheatley up, while Caroline kicked away Rick's gun and kneeled down to examine him. Chell, meanwhile, stepped to the object and picked it up.

It was a Companion Cube.

Doug Rattman stepped through the door after his cube, taking it from Chell with a nervous grin. "I heard about your problem over the speakers. You sabotaged the AI stuff, then?"

"Not us. Her." Wheatley coughed, pointing at Chell.

"Really? In any case, Greg believes that it was you. We need to get out of here ASAP. I know how the walls connect up, we should go that way." He scratched his hair.

Caroline stood up. "Kevin is holding a direct elevator for us. We need to get back to him in the Astronomy department."

Doug looked around to the dead cameras. "No time to go all the way down. We need to get out."

Wheatley, apparently fully recovered, said, "He saved our lives when we went through there in the first place. Besides, we also have an elevator straight down there."

Doug raised an eyebrow. "Really? I didn't know elevators went that far."

"Normally they don't, but Kevin has access to the control board. He called one specially." Said Caroline.

"Okay then. But we have to hurry. You'll have to lead the way."

Chell pointed to Rick, still lying on the floor and bleeding from a small gash on his head.

Wheatley looked at the security guard. "He can just stay here. I don't like it when people point guns in my face."

Chell fumbled for her notepad and scribbled furiously, showing it to Wheatley: _We have to bring him. He did me a great favor in the future, and paid with his life. It concerns Part Five. There's no way I could repay him in my time, but perhaps now I can repay him in kind._

Caroline said, "Sure, but we're not carrying him. You want him along for the ride, you bring him."

Chell shrugged, and slung Rick over her shoulder. She followed the others back to the elevator.

/

Arriving back at the Astronomy department, they presented quite a sight to Craig and Kevin.

"What is this? The elevator barely has space for six! We can't possibly fit in eight!" yelled Craig as they came level with the floor.

"We know," said Caroline, stepping out of the packed elevator. "But Doug saved our lives, and Chell says for whatever reason she owes Rick there a debt, and insisted we bring him."

Kevin started fiddling around with the hologram. "I might be able to help with this. Hang on..."

There was a hiss, and the entire elevator shaft, including the capsule itself, expanded to approximately twice its size.

"That is Aperture Science cash at work there. The elevators can all expand to accommodate increased load. I don't know the complicated workings of it, but it sure is a good thing for us."

With that, he simply stepped into the elevator, gesturing that the others should do so as well. He snapped his fingers, and the hologram Aperture shrank back into Earth, which returned to the sun and then to the Milky Way. As it did so, the elevator shot up towards the surface and freedom.

Despite the fact that the elevator shot past several floors a second, there were several floors in every level, so it took the elevator nearly a full minute to traverse all 51 levels. This minute was spent in complete silence, as the entire group contemplated the implications of what they'd just done.

_How am I going to return to my own time now? _Wondered Chell. _I'll never be able to get back into Aperture, let alone all the way down to the Test Shaft. And even if I could, I don't think there's any way to change the direction of travel._

Then the elevator came to the surface. It wasn't the flimsy metal shack that Chell had arrived in the last time she'd left Aperture; instead it was some sort of small barn, or at least would look like that from the outside. Nobody was around but them.

"1498, come on!" yelled Wheatley. With a start, Chell looked around. Everyone else had all left the building already. She stepped forward, intending to hop over the threshold, but she fell to the ground when a spasm of pain shot up her right leg. Rick dropped limply from her shoulder, rolling a short distance away.

The others rushed back. "Bloody hell, what's going on?" shouted Wheatley.

Chell looked down at her leg. Glowing particles shot off from it as it turned to black dust and blew away on the wind. The crossbow and boots in her bag were doing the same, and it was spreading across her body at an alarming rate. Spots appeared on her stomach, her arms, and she saw the particles floating past her eyes from spots of pain on her face.

"What the hell?" shouted Craig. "What the hell is this? I've never seen anything like it!"

Her arms shaking, Chell brought out her pad, unaffected by the occurrence. She wrote, _I don't..._

Then it came to her. Only herself, her boots, and the crossbow were affected: things that came from the future. _It's a paradox,_ she wrote, hurriedly. _Changed too much. Better future for all now though. Tell Wheatley I-_

At that moment, her hand turned to dust and blew away. She rolled over and looked at the sun above. _My last sight. That's what I wanted to see._ She lost vision in her right eye first, then her left. Then she blacked out.

/

Michelle stood dumbstruck at the black dust whirling around in the wind. As they watched, the dust glowed bright white and with firecracker-like pops vanished completely.

"'Repay him in kind' she wrote. This is what she meant, saving his life even though it might cost hers," said Doug. "Even in my wildest dreams I never even imagined anything like this.

"Not just his," said Wheatley. "All of ours. Without her, Greg would have killed Caroline, or killed the rest of us in revenge for trying to defy him. And we'll never know who she was, or why she did what she did..."

Michelle sniffed, a tear falling from the corner of her eye. Wheatley put one arm over her shoulders. "Hey now, don't cry. I think she wanted us all safe, at any cost. She shot at Greg, for God's sake. She's being rewarded now by pretty much any definition of the afterlife there's ever been."

Craig swept a hand through his hair. In ancient Greece, it was said that if someone was a great hero in their lifetime, they were admitted to paradise. I don't think there's been many greater heroes than that woman."

Silently, Caroline put her own arm around Michelle's shoulders, guiding her away from the building. Craig put an arm under the shoulder of the unconscious Rick and followed. Doug and Kevin walked silently behind them.

Unbeknownst to any of them, a scuffed turret sat wrapped in skeins of rope overhead, watching them leave with a flickering optic.

In a childlike voice, it whispered, "Remember."

/

I warned you!

Anyway, this isn't the end. The tale shall continue. I wouldn't end a story with three chapters. How can it continue, you ask? Wait and see...


	4. Surreality

Light.

Bright light. That was the first thing she noticed. Then confusion.

_Where am I?_ She tried to look around, but her vision did not respond. The light, in any event, was omnipresent, and she had a vague feeling that it should have been blinding. Then a more pressing question occurred to her.

_Who am I? _The answer eluded her.

The light began to recede. She found herself in a corridor, clearly constructed from stone but in patterns so intricate as to imply that it had been grown, not carved. She tried to take a step, but found herself incapable of movement.

A lengthy amount of time passed, though she couldn't tell how long. It could have been hours, or years. But eventually, she heard noises coming from somewhere behind her. Gunfire, followed by animalistic growls of rage and screams of pain. A man ran past her line of sight, wearing some sort of metal armor painted in an orange pattern of some sort. He turned around and shot a weapon of some sort at something outside her line of sight. She noticed that his brown hair was cropped short, and his goatee treated similarly. On the chestplate of his armor was emblazoned a symbol that she didn't recognise. His glasses clashed oddly with his military outfit, as they resembled something a bookish technician might wear, and yet at the same time they seemed to complete him somehow.

He didn't appear to see her. She tried to call out, ask what was going on, but she had no control over herself.

She felt a humming in the air. The man didn't perceive it, but somehow she knew something was changing that should have never been changed.

With a rumble, the wall directly across from her shook once, twice, and then exploded outward, knocking the man off his feet. A huge creature stepped into her line of sight, not from behind the destroyed wall but from where the man had come from, seeming at the same time biological and mechanical. It raised a pincer-like claw and brought it to bear on the man. At first, she thought it was hunched over to fit in the tunnel, but after looking at it for slightly longer (not that she had any choice but to do so - all the functions her instincts told her she should have failed to function) she realised that its back was simply unusually bulbous. Its one eye sat deep over a wide, fanged mouth.

With a humming noise, its claw clicked open and emitted a blast of heat. She didn't feel it, but the walls and floor of the tunnel turned black and even began to slip as if molten. The man, having fallen out of her field of vision, made no apparent effort to fight back.

Then her vision shifted up to the dust-filled gap in the wall, even without her willing it. When she attempted to look around, she found herself once again incapable, and the creature, like the man, took no notice of her. However, she saw something it didn't: many lights burning through the cloud of dust. The lights were orange and blue, and flicked around like searchlights.

There was a beep, a humming, and then a loud crack as the creature vanished. There was no cinematic recoiling or theatrical scream, but one moment the creature was there, and then it wasn't.

The lights moved forward, scanning the vicinity, and in the process revealing themselves to be robots of some sort. There were two distinct models, corresponding to the orange and blue lights, which of course emanated from the units' optics.

The orange-optic models were slender, with an elliptical main body connected loosely to a framework of limbs. They each held a long-barreled weapon of some sort, the barrel of one still smoking. It was notably taller than its blue counterpart, which would have been about shoulder-height to a human. The blue units were also much more heavily built, with spherical bodies and wider-set arms and legs, apparently designed more for stability and strength than the agility built into the orange units. They wielded short metallic blades, rather than the projectile weapons in the hands of the Orange-units.

She remembered them from somewhere, but she couldn't figure out where. Suddenly an image flashed over her eyes of one of the orange units standing on a ledge in a collapsing building and dancing about as if startled. As quickly as it started, it was over.

A blue-unit gestured rapidly towards half of the unit and then down the hallway where the man and creature had come from, while making a noise that she could only describe as 'burbling'. A pair of orange-units rushed down the hallway and then back, making a noise of their own, more higher-pitched than the Blue's. The Blue nodded, and the group trooped down the tunnel in the direction in which the man had been going.

She heard something crack, and she sped after the troop of robots, watching their movements sped up not unlike a video on fast forward. Still, though, she could exert no control over her trajectory, nor could she sense herself touching the ground. The images flashed by too fast for her absorb details, but she did see flashes that she thought corresponded to weapons fire.

Then, suddenly, she stopped. Events returned to normal speed. Now she was standing outside a huge concrete complex. A symbol of the greek letter 'lambda' was emblazoned on the door. A group of people in lab coats stood at a certain distance away from the building, setting up a ring of metal rods around it and hooking them up to a series of generators. When one of the people passed in front of her, she expected to see the same lambda logo on the coat, but instead there was a logo of a partially opened iris, with the word _Aperture_ running out of it.

A window shattered in the concrete complex and the squad of robots that she'd seen in the tunnels burst through and ran towards the scientists. As they ran, a swarm of easily thousands of alien creatures of every description ran, crawled, jumped, or hovered after them.

They leapt one by one over the barrier of metal rods and, as the last one passed over, a scientist pressed a button linked to the rods and a rippling blue energy field spread out over the complex in a dome shape.

The aliens slowed down, stopping at the edge of the barrier. A large one similar to the creature that she had seen kill the man with glasses stepped forward and extended one of its appendages toward the barrier. As it touched, it jerked back as if in pain, but the barrier somehow held on to it. It then began to pass through the barrier, sparking and trying to pull itself back. As more and more of it passed through the field, it began to blacken and crumble until it arrived on the same side as the scientists, nothing but a pile of ash.

The other creatures drew back, and then began to turn around, before stopping and cowering as a large potato-shaped object hovered overhead. Large masses of technology protruded from its 'body', including what appeared to be a breathing apparatus of some sort.

The hovering creature looked at the scientists, and then it focussed on the barrier. The rippling field flexed, but held, before what was apparently the sheer power of the creature's thoughts.

As the barrier flexed, it appeared to vanish briefly. Apparently emboldened, the creature floated onward and attempted to pass through the now-invisible barrier in front of it.

More sparks and crackling, and a few moments later, the hovering creature, too, was ashes.

The robots and scientists high-fived each other. One of the scientists pointed to the device and said, "The Aperture Science Material Emancipation Field is a success! Greg should be pleased to hear this!"

/

Her vision whited out again, but seemingly seconds later the light receded, revealing a large room with wall-to-wall bookshelves, and a large desk in the center. Behind the desk sat a man. At first she thought the man was extremely old, but then she realized that his shoulder-length hair was simply bleached bone white.

He was dressed in a long duster that bunched awkwardly around the armrests of his chair. The old-looking coat was light brown and made of battered leather.

The man looked up at a huge portrait that sat above the doors into the room. It depicted a man superficially similar to the man in the chair below, but with receding, short hair and an older-looking face. He wore a similar type of coat to that worn by the man behind the desk.

"Dammit, Uncle," said the man. His voice rasped like that of a much older person. "Why do you torment me even from beyond the grave? The AI was my last hope. With its failure..." The conversation sounded like one he'd had often with the picture.

He moved out from behind the desk, revealing that his right leg ended in a stump at the knee. His pants were tied off just below, and he sat in a wheelchair. He rolled in front of the desk.

"Every turn you've outshone me, even being dead _twenty years_. At least you were buried whole. That bitch who shot me... They had to hack off my leg. All the things you tried to do over the years - the _Mantis Men_, for god's sake - and the worst that happened to you was some breathing problems. It'd take a miracle to..."

There was a knock at the door. "Come in!" he yelled.

A scientist, one of the ones from the complex, opened the door and said, "Mister Johnson, the upgraded Material Emancipation Grill has been a success. They closed off the Black Mesa facility with the alien creatures still inside. There are media people outside waiting for a statement from you."

Mr. Johnson didn't hear what the scientist said for a moment. When he did, his face split into a huge grin.

He looked up at the portrait. "Do you hear that, old man? Not even you could have bested Black Mesa." Then, to the scientist, "Tell them I'll be right out."

/

Her vision whited out again, this time interrupted by brief flashes: Mr. Johnson giving a speech to a crowd, then a flash of the blue energy dome, thousands of alien creatures milling about underneath, then a group of individuals standing around a desk. One sat behind it, in front of a typewriter, and holding up a sheet of paper to the others. She felt some connection to them, but before she could think about it further, more images flashed in front of her. A production line, building millions of the military robots from the other vision, then an old woman on a hospital bed, then a ceremony of some sort. Then she found herself in front of a screen which displayed a dizzying sequence of new images, mostly of unrecognizable technology.

Though she didn't catch many of the images, she noticed a massive vault-like chamber, a wristband with a device attached to the rim, and some form of polearm.

After those images ran down, her vision whited out once again and she found herself floating in the air over a simple double bed. On one side lay the woman who she had noticed in the image of the people around the desk.

Once again she felt the connection to her, but now with more time to think about it, she was able to organise the sensation and describe it.

She felt drawn to the woman below, as if she were a piece of dirt being drawn into a drain. She had a strong feeling that the woman below _shouldn't _exist, and yet her presence was infinitely more powerful than her own.

Now, she began to feel the parts of her body that her instinct had told her should be present, but no sooner had she regained sensation in an area, was that area reduced to glowing dust and 'sucked' down into the body of the woman below. In fact, it almost seemed as if the disintegration was happening first.

She flexed her hand experimentally, and at the same time, the hand of the woman below twitched unconsciously.

_It's not my body I'm feeling,_ she realized, _It's hers._

She had a vague sensation that at one point the idea of becoming someone else would have repulsed and terrified her. Now, though, she was at a loss to feel much emotion at all, even though she wanted to. It was as if her mind was also being absorbed into the other woman, sleeping and totally unaware of the goings-on above her.

As such, she never realized when she was completely gone.

/

Michelle woke with a start, and for a moment felt convinced she had seen something hovering over her bed. But then she realized it was just an afterimage, like when one looked at a mirror with a bright light behind oneself, and then looked quickly away. She put it down to being half asleep and looked over at the digital clock on her nightstand.

The display read 3:00. She groaned in frustration and rolled over, lying facedown on the pillow.

_What was that dream I was just having?_ She rubbed her temples. _I think it was one of __**those**__ dreams again..._

_/  
_This chapter was shorter (by far) than the last one, but about average for most of my work. As such, I am satisfied with it (for now). I hope you are as well.

Also, I (finally) completed the cover image for _The Six Cores._ It didn't turn out as good as I'd expected, mostly because of the fact that it was shrunk something like ten times to fit into the tiny slot provided for story covers. In any case, I'll be taking a break from this story to wrap up that one. Two more chapters there, then back here.

Madhighlander Away!


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